whaleprep/DATA.md

Data sourcing — JEE Main question bank

Status

scripts/import_examgoal.py imports 9,813 real JEE Main PYQs (2002–2025, all three subjects) from the MIT-licensed jee_mains_pyqs_data_base release asset (1762787474-DataBaseChapters-v007.pkl, ~24 MB, 14,973 questions total). The keep rule is: type=mcq, fully text (no <img> anywhere in stem/options/explanation), exactly one correct option in A–D. Skipped: 1,909 image-questions, 2,875 answer-less, 19 multi-correct, ~357 with stray images in options/explanations.

python3 scripts/import_examgoal.py path/to/app.db [--pkl db.pkl]

Safe to re-run: INSERTs skip stems already present, so the 24 hand-written seed questions are never duplicated. Existing deployments pick up the new CREATE INDEX statements on boot (init_db runs them idempotently).

The demo seed (src/db.rs, 24 hand-written questions) remains as the offline fallback when the pickle cannot be fetched. scripts/expand_seed.py is kept for synthetic load testing only.

Attribution

Question content: HostServer001/jee_mains_pyqs_data_base (MIT), itself reverse-engineered from a subscription site's API and cached. Upstream model credit: examgoal database schema. No NTA PDFs were scraped — NTA publishes image-rendered PDFs with no machine-readable question text (pdftotext yields only question IDs).

Schema mapping

The bank is organized into the official NTA JEE Main syllabus units (2026 Paper 1 B.E./B.Tech):

• Physics: 20 units (Units and Measurements through Electronic Devices)
• Chemistry: 21 units (Some Basic Concepts through Practical Chemistry)
• Maths: 14 units (Sets, Relations and Functions through Trigonometry)

scripts/reorg_nta_units.py maps upstream subtopics into these units by keyword matching; stragglers are placed manually (documented in the script).

The 24 hand-written demo questions that previously shipped inside the seed have been removed from the live bank: they were trivial one-liners that diluted difficulty. A fresh install still seeds them so the app is not empty before import (see src/db.rs), but they are labeled in the seed code as demo content.

Sanitizer contract (both sides match)

Write side (import_examgoal.py::sanitize) and read side (views.rs::rich) share one allowlist: br p sup sub b strong i em u ol ul li table tbody thead tr th td span h3, attributes always stripped, <picture>/<source>/<style>/<col> blocks dropped whole. KaTeX renders $$..$$ display math and \(..\) inline at page load with trust: false.

Adding more questions later

Re-run the importer against a newer pickle release. For NUM questions the upstream data carries no answers, so they are excluded until a verified answer source exists. The answer column for MCQ is a single letter.

Why NUM answers are not extracted from explanations

Audited 2026-10-12: integer-question explanations do end with the numeric result (= 80, Total 11, is 8), but the phrasing varies per question (Hence, Clearly, no. of integers in S is, bare = X mid-derivation) and several tails contain multiple numbers. A regex would mis-key a meaningful fraction, and a wrong answer key teaches the wrong result — worse than no question. NUM import stays out until NTA final answer keys (authoritative per-shift source) are transcribed. The grader already supports NUM with 0.1% tolerance for hand-added questions.